Sunday, October 28, 2007

Sleep deprivation may exist in three basic categories. One, when you have a hard time falling to sleep at night. Two, if you find it easy to get to Slumberland and last there for a few hours or minutes, only to awake in the middle of the night and never be able to return to sleep. And three, when you have short sleep patterns at night yet you wake up early at dawn no matter how insufficient your sleep was.

More often than not, sleep deprivation is caused or influenced by behavior; sometimes voluntary but rarely intentional; you just won't hear someone giving himself a hurrah for deliberately cutting off his sleep hours! If your lifestyle or work results to the disruption of what can be considered normal sleep patterns, you are at risk of depriving yourself with adequate sleep. Sleep deprivation is a direct result of the choices or preferences that you make for yourself.

But the real problem with chronic lack of sleep is that it can set off other disorders. And you are lucky if your lack of sleep leaves you only with inability to concentrate or a bad temper the next day. There are cases where sleep deprivation can lead to much more serious disorders such as these two infamous conditions.

Heart Diseases

Experts have found that people who have inadequate sleep unnecessarily increase their risk to heart ailments. In fact, such risk is more than double than for those who manage to have enough hours of sleep.

The link between heart diseases and sleep deficiency can be explained by the increase in the levels of stress hormones in the body every time a person has sleep deficit. The increased stress hormones are used by the body to keep it on alert status despite total lack of sleep. But sadly, these stress hormones are also responsible for increasing one's risk to heart attacks and propelling higher blood pressure.

In essence, lack of sleep can cause low inflammatory indicators in your blood vessels. While these inflammations can be negligible at low levels, they can however make you more susceptible to cardiac arrest or stroke if left unchecked and unchanged for a long time.

Obesity

Sleep deprivation has been linked to obesity. This also supports findings that point to obese people having less sleep than people with healthy weight levels. Current studies show overwhelming proofs that chronic lack of sleep can undermine one's metabolic rate and affect a person's eating habits.

Lack of sleep can alter hormonal levels, which in turn, triggers bigger appetite. And as sleep deprivation is a big factor that causes fatigue and stress, it also brings about an unhealthy change in a person's diet; primarily characterized by a person's inclination towards fast food eating habits. Bigger appetite and fast food consumption are two recipes for obesity which can all start from sleep deprivation.

But here's the good news. Chronic sleep deprivation can be easily treated. To deal with this problem you only need to change your current sleep patterns. The best and often the only way to treat this disorder is to start increasing your sleeping time until you can easily get no less than eight hours of sleep each day. And then, you stick to it.

If you find it hard to get sufficient sleep at night, you should make time to visit a sleep specialist. Apart from detecting what factors cause your sleep problems, a sleep specialist can help you fix your daily sleep patterns. You can also enhance the quality of sleep you get by using products like Sedamine.